Houston's panel still the best response to the boats

FIVE months ago our politicians were shedding tears as they told stories of asylum seekers lost at sea. Their tears are long dry but the problem of desperate people boarding leaky boats in the hope of a better life has not gone away.

On Wednesday the Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, did all but raise the white flag on the much detested Pacific solution, admitting that Nauru and Papua New Guinea's Manus Island will not cope with the 2500 asylum seekers who have reached Australia by boat every month since August. Thousands of arrivals will be released into the Australian community but without the right to work and other privileges granted previous asylum seekers.

With the community being divided, and even the term ''refugee'' being used as a pejorative term by some media outlets, it's time for bold if painful action.

In June, Julia Gillard charged three eminent Australians with trying to broker a solution on asylum seeker policy after the nation's 226 federal politicians failed comprehensively. Her move followed the defeat at the hands of the Coalition and the Greens of a bill that would have enabled the government to send asylum seekers to Malaysia and Nauru.

Led by the recently retired Defence Force chief, Angus Houston, with the refugee expert Paris Aristotle and Howard government diplomat and Foreign Affairs secretary Michael L'Estrange, the panel recommended an improved version of the Malaysia resettlement plan that had been shot down in the High Court in August 2011.

That plan envisaged Australia sending 800 arrivals to Malaysia, where they would, in theory at least, go to the back of the resettlement ''queue'', while Australia would take 4000 people assessed to be refugees off Malaysia's hands. The government married its support for the Malaysia plan with a rise in the annual refugee intake from 13,750 to 20,000.

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In August the Houston panel recommended that Australia resume the processing of asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru, and that the Malaysia people swap should be ''built on further'' before anyone was sent there. It remained for Parliament to amend the Malaysia plan.

Parliament hasn't, and in the barely 100 days since, another leg of refugee policy has fallen off with Bowen's concession on Wednesday.

In opposition, Labor made much of the alleged harshness of the Howard government's policy of giving temporary protection visas. In office it has been ''mugged by reality''. The new Rudd government discarded the Pacific solution and soon the boats were coming back in numbers. About 7600 people have arrived since August 13. Labor has shown itself to be ineffectual while wearing the criticism of its left flank that it is no better than Howard - and this week, with Bowen's announcement, the cruellest cut of all: the allegation that the new bridging visas are worse, in terms of compassion, than anything Howard brought in.

But no one comes to this debate with clean hands. With no obvious aim but to wreck the Gillard government's credibility, the Coalition voted with the Greens to thwart Labor on the Malaysia plan. The Greens are long on compassion but can only offer a policy that is ''open-door'' in all but name.

The Malaysia plan served not so much as a solution to a humanitarian problem as a shot across the bows of the criminal networks of people-smugglers. Their ''product'' would be much less attractive once it became known that it was not Australia but limbo in Malaysia that awaited.

That Kuala Lumpur is not one of the 144 signatories to the UN refugee convention is the Achilles heel of the Malaysia plan. But with the improvements suggested by the Houston panel, it remains the best of a bad lot.

With Tony Abbott offering nothing more profound yesterday than making the new arrivals work for their welfare payments, the Coalition risks having asylum seekers at the top of its in-tray if, as expected, it comes to government next year. Meanwhile it's time for the Prime Minister to pick up the phone to Kuala Lumpur.